Microsoft Office SharePoint server is becoming a popular enterprise application as companies seek to enhance collaboration across enterprises. But the backup and recovery of SharePoint data is proving to be a challenge for many enterprises.
SharePoint has two features to guard against accidental deletion of data: version history and a recycle bin. SharePoint's recycle bin has an additional safety net in the form of an administrator-accessible Site Collection Recycle Bin. Unfortunately, versioning and the recycle bin don't address other types of data loss, such as errors or corruption. Also, if an entire document library is deleted, the entire library must be restored. These are two big themes with SharePoint backup and recovery: SharePoint is an application that's challenging to back up and, even when that's successful, recovery of any site data at a granular level is an ordeal. Here's an overview of ways to protect SharePoint content.
Native tools for SharePoint backup and recovery
Native SharePoint backup/recovery tools exist, but they're not without their shortcomings. There's a command-line tool for backup (stsadm.exe) that performs a site-level full-fidelity backup (not to be confused with the smigrate.exe migration utility that can make a copy of a site, but doesn't guarantee all customizations and settings won't be lost). Command-line utilities, unless part of a batch job, can be frustrating to administer because they have to be run from the local server and are prone to human error. Creating scripts to kick off the backup process and leveraging the Windows Task Scheduler to establish a regular backup schedule for the batch job can overcome these challenges, but there are a few more issues to deal with. First, some data can't be protected with the command-line utility, including the IIS metabase. Second, indexing is suspended while the...
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command-line backup executes, which means that anything new added to SharePoint during this time isn't available for search until after the job is complete. Finally, the issue of granularity remains an all-or-nothing process. If a single item needs to be recovered, the entire site must be restored to an alternate system and the single document then re-introduced to SharePoint.
SharePoint offers another native tool for backup and restore, the Central Administration user interface. On the plus side, this approach lets the backup be performed for the whole farm down to the content database (with recovery offered at the same level of backup) and provides a choice of full or differential schemes. The downside is that scheduling backup jobs isn't possible and retention management is a manual process.
SQL Server backup
Another popular approach to protecting SharePoint content is to simply perform SQL Server backups. Unfortunately, this approach will leave some SharePoint components unprotected, including IIS meta data, Web front-end data and search indexes. Having a SQL backup ensures full fidelity restore of the database and its content. But these need to be completed with backups from the file system to recover the whole farm in a disaster recovery situation. It's important to note that a SQL backup doesn't help with restoring individual items. You'll have to restore the SQL database with a different name, attach it to another farm and restore items to production. This approach may only be suitable for larger sites that have SQL Server tools and a database administrator.
Commercial products for SharePoint backup and recovery
Third-party backup and recovery software is another way to go, especially to address the limitations in the native utilities and SQL backup method. Many third-party backup vendors offer some capability for protecting SharePoint, either through a dedicated module for SharePoint backup or a SharePoint app-specific agent that works in conjunction with the backup engine. A backup app can handle the database and system-level protection required of the various SharePoint components. These solutions will deliver automation and customization of backups with features like full, incremental and differential strategies; compression; encryption; direct and indirect restore; retention policies; and expired data clean-up. And many of the backup platforms offer capabilities for creating offsite copies through replication or tape creation.
The most glaring omission for many backup vendors' solutions is granular recovery. To date, only a handful of products offer item-level recovery that doesn't involve a two-step recovery process. These solutions come from a number of vendors, including AvePoint, CommVault Systems, IBM Corp., NetApp and Symantec Corp. Others may redirect the recovery and create a duplicate copy, which will require more storage capacity and necessitate the manual movement of content between duplicate and original sites.
SharePoint usage will likely continue to grow. As the amount and value of data stored on this platform rises, implications for backup and recovery become critical. Taking recovery time and recovery point objectives for SharePoint data into account, it's likely that the top criteria for selecting SharePoint backup will be full fidelity protection, automation, and the ability to recover at site, sub-site and item levels.
This article originally appeared in Storage magazine.
About this author: Lauren Whitehouse is an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group and covers data protection technologies. Lauren is a 20-plus-year veteran in the software industry, formerly serving in marketing and software development roles.
